Perfect Storm Stores CO2 Perfectly
| Mon Jul. 28, 2008 7:19 PM PDT
Hurricanes may be getting bigger and more frequent as a result of climate change. But they may also be counterbalancing their destruction by sequestering millions of tons of carbon in the deep ocean.
A new study finds that a single typhoon in Taiwan buried as much carbon as all the other rains in that country in a year.
Of the 61 million tons of sediment carried out to sea by the Choshui River during Typhoon Mindulle in 2004, some 500,000 tons consisted of particles of carbon, weathered from Taiwan's mountains.
That's 95 percent as much carbon as the river transports during normal rains in a year. It also equates to more than 400 tons of carbon per square mile washed away during the storm.
The good news is that once the carbon gets buried in the ocean it eventually becomes sedimentary rock and doesn't return to the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
So, the work of tropical storms isn't enough to cancel out the warming gases we're putting into the atmosphere. But it's a pretty good response from a stressed planet.
Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award.
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Comments
Sorry, I don't get this. So when a storm fixes carbon, the carbon originates from CO2. How do you know it is not the remains of plant life from the shores of the river?
And how is that carbon cut loose from the O2 and in what form is it stored? You mention "Sedimentary rock", but that sounds a bit awkward. Rock usually consists of sillicon, not carbon.
I don't get it either. Carbon in itself isn't a bad thing; carbon dioxide, yes. But if this carbon is coming from mountains, not from the atmosphere, I don't see where anything gets "fixed." It's just rock turning to silt and turning back to rock again.
Submitted by Legacy on Tue Jul. 29, 2008 10:29 AM PDT.
Sorry for the confusion. Here's the better/longer explanation.
The team analyzes water and river sediments from around the world to measure how much carbon is pulled from the atmosphere as mountains weather away.
They study two types of weathering: physical and chemical. Physical weathering happens when organic matter containing carbon adheres to soil that is washed into the ocean and buried.
Chemical weathering happens when silicate rock on the mountainside is exposed to carbon dioxide and water, and the rock disintegrates. The carbon washes out to sea, where it eventually forms calcium carbonate and gets deposited on the ocean floor.
If the carbon gets buried in the ocean, it eventually becomes part of sedimentary rock, and doesn't return to the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
Though the carbon buried in the ocean by storms won't solve global warming, knowing how much carbon is buried offshore of mountainous islands such as Taiwan could help scientists make better estimates of how much carbon is in the atmosphere, and help them decipher its effect on global climate change.
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